Surprise! The New York Times paid ZERO taxes in 2014

WASHINGTON, October 2, 2016 – The New York Times and other Clinton campaign media co-conspirators launched a smear campaign against Donald Trump this weekend, using an ancient, likely illegally obtained 1995 Trump tax filing as phony “proof” he’s been systematically avoiding the payment of Federal taxes practically forever.

But, in a delicious bit of irony, it turns out that the New York Times itself paid no Federal taxes at all as recently as 2014. That’s a real October Surprise that Pravda-on-the-Hudson probably didn’t want you to know.

Here’s the Times’ dodgy scare headline:

Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found

“Republican nominee Donald Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 that might have resulted in him not paying taxes in some subsequent years.”

(Italics above courtesy CDN.)

Given the Times’ stamp of approval, the media attack dogs from the now-secret successor to the infamous left-wing “Journolist” quickly emerged from their dens, piling on with copycat reports, hoping to use this mass smear technique to reverse Trump’s momentum in the polls as November’s election date approaches. One example, again via Breitbart, is the

“…implication, reinforced by CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union on Sunday morning, is that Trump ‘avoided’ paying taxes, when in fact his tax liability was zero.”

But Trump, in fact, “avoided” precisely nothing. In a Sunday morning article on the subject, CDN’s Michael Busler explains how the U.S. tax system works, permitting essentially anyone with business or other kinds of provable, tax-favored business losses, to deduct those losses against current and even future income.

Such tax-fighting strategies may appear as pure evil in the over-active minds of America’s left-leaning Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). But these and similar strategies are perfectly legal under the current Federal tax code as a way of encouraging business risk and investment, as former New York Mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani points out in the Breitbart report:

“New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended Trump on Sunday, telling NBC News’ Meet the Press that Trump was a “genius” in business who was simply doing what the tax code allows every American to do by counting losses against tax liabilities, and bouncing back from failure to success.”

Slanderously implying this legal maneuver is somehow an example of Trump’s implied dishonesty is typical of today’s lapdog media. This is not news. It’s innuendo and opinion and nothing more.

“As Business Insider explains, this [New York Times] factoid allows them to speculate that The Donald may have paid no federal taxes for nearly twenty years.”

And fanciful, devious speculation, not verifiable facts, is what’s in play here. Tracking with our own observations when we spotted the story this morning, Shaw delves more deeply into the Times’ dishonest wordsmithery:

“The fire under all of this smoke is, of course, barely enough to light a cigar, but that’s not the point of the story. You’ll notice a constant set of phrases in all of the coverage of this ‘bombshell’ release. They include things such as, might have and could have or may not have paid. That’s because the actual document only shows a massive loss, which Trump claimed in 1995. What’s been established is that the loss in question opened the door to Trump potentially not owing any federal taxes over a considerable period of time because of the $916M loss. What’s also mentioned in decidedly muted tones is that if Trump wound up not owing any federal tax, that it was completely legal.”

In other words, the Times’ breathless condemnation of Trump’s alleged malfeasance has no facts to back it up. Worse, the paper’s unfounded anti-Trump smear clearly implies—but does not prove—that a perfectly legal, commonly employed interpretation of the U.S. tax code is some kind of criminal act that makes Trump unfit to serve as the next American president.

Ironically, however, this obvious political hit job by the New York Times et. al., has already been countered by the news that the Gray Lady herself is guilty of paying no Federal taxes as recently as 2014 as an online Forbes Magazine piece by Jeffrey Dorfman reported earlier this year.

“… for tax year 2014, The New York Times paid no taxes and got an income tax refund of $3.5 million even though they had a pre-tax profit of $29.9 million in 2014. In other words, their post-tax profit was higher than their pre-tax profit. The explanation in their 2014 annual report is, ‘The effective tax rate for 2014 was favorably affected by approximately $21.1 million for the reversal of reserves for uncertain tax positions due to the lapse of applicable statutes of limitations.’ If you don’t think it took fancy accountants and tax lawyers to make that happen, read the statement again.”

So this legal maneuver by the Times is good, while the same action by Donald Trump is evil. The mendacity of the Times’ phony, anti-Trump October Surprise hit piece is painfully obvious.

Let’s go back down Memory Lane just a few years ago. Remember that never-concluded anti-conservative witch-hunt by the IRS? You know, the one that may have contributed to the 2012 victory of Barack Obama vs. Republican candidate Mitt Romney by depriving newly founded conservative organizations and PACs of nonprofit status, thus throttling considerable cash flow that might have helped support Obama’s opponent?

The IRS has been bobbing and weaving ever since, with its officials taking the fifth and stonewalling repeated Congressional attempts to discover the facts in this scandal, including the extent to which supposedly private tax returns were distributed to pro-Democrat operatives.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Trump—a nominal Democrat at the time but a wealthy one—was on that original hit list. Even worse, Trump’s records may have been smuggled out more recently, perhaps indicating that the anti-conservative IRS operation is ongoing but has gone further underground.

Where’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times story on this?

*Cartoon by Branco. Reproduced by arrangement and with permission via LegalInsurrection.

Biographical Note: Dateline Award-winning music and theater critic for The Connection Newspapers and the Reston-Fairfax Times, Terry was the music critic for the Washington Times print edition (1994-2010) and online Communities (2010-2014). Since 2014, he has been the Business and Entertainment Editor for Communities Digital News (CDN).
A former stockbroker and a writer and editor with many interests, he served as editor under contract from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and continues to write on science and business topics. He is a graduate of Georgetown University (BA, MA) and the University of South Carolina where he was awarded a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and co-founded one of the earliest Writing Labs in the country. Twitter: @terryp17